Causality and eXplainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) have developed as separate fields in computer science, even though the underlying concepts of causation and explanation share common ancient roots. This is further enforced by the lack of review works jointly covering these two fields. In this paper, we investigate the literature to try to understand how and to what extent causality and XAI are intertwined. More precisely, we seek to uncover what kinds of relationships exist between the two concepts and how one can benefit from them, for instance, in building trust in AI systems. As a result, three main perspectives are identified. In the first one, the lack of causality is seen as one of the major limitations of current AI and XAI approaches, and the "optimal" form of explanations is investigated. The second is a pragmatic perspective and considers XAI as a tool to foster scientific exploration for causal inquiry, via the identification of pursue-worthy experimental manipulations. Finally, the third perspective supports the idea that causality is propaedeutic to XAI in three possible manners: exploiting concepts borrowed from causality to support or improve XAI, utilizing counterfactuals for explainability, and considering accessing a causal model as explaining itself. To complement our analysis, we also provide relevant software solutions used to automate causal tasks. We believe our work provides a unified view of the two fields of causality and XAI by highlighting potential domain bridges and uncovering possible limitations.

通过研究文献，我们发现因果关系和可解释人工智能(XAI)是紧密联系的，彼此之间存在三种关系视角：缺乏因果关系限制了当前人工智能与可解释人工智能方法的发展，理想的解释形式的探索，以及因果关系作为可解释人工智能的先导，并通过从因果关系中借用概念、利用反事实以及将因果模型作为自我解释等方式进行研究。通过提供相关软件解决方案，我们为自动化因果任务提供了补充分析，并强调了因果关系和可解释人工智能领域之间的潜在领域桥梁和可能的限制。

可解释人工智能中因果关系的作用